The alleged leader of the Islamic State, Abu Hussein al-Qurashi, has been killed in a Turkish operation in northwestern Syria, Turkish President Erdogan reported Sunday night. Qurashi is said to have been ‘neutralized’ in an operation by the Turkish intelligence service just outside the town of Jindires, near the border with Turkey.
Islamic State has not yet confirmed Qurashi’s death. President Erdogan gave no details about the operation. However, the first messages about the alleged death of an IS leader appeared on Twitter on Saturday afternoon. Local Resources told a Turkish journalist that he blew himself up after the Turks tried to capture him on the night from Friday to Saturday.
Mahmoud Haffar, the head of the local council in Jindires, also confirms reports of the death of the IS leader. Qurashi is said to have been hiding in a remote home among olive groves two kilometers north of Jindires. “I hear that families were still there until two weeks ago,” says Haffar by telephone NRC. “Maybe he was [Qurashi] been there for two weeks, maybe longer. We do not know.”
Iraqi descent
Little is known about Qurashi itself. He is said to be of Iraqi descent and was appointed fourth ‘caliph’ of Islamic State in November 2022. His two predecessors were killed in U.S. operations in quick succession in 2022. It indicates that IS has struggled to regain leadership since the death in 2019 of its first caliph, Abu Bakr al-Bagdadi.
That does not alter the fact that the jihadists still have the necessary clout. Since the fall of the physical caliphate in 2019, Islamic State has been operating underground. The group is estimated to still have several thousand fighters in Iraq and Syria and managed to free hundreds of them from a prison in northeastern Syria at the beginning of last year. Since then, the terrorist threat from IS has increased, the Dutch intelligence service AIVD recently warned in its annual report.
Qurashi is said to be the third caliph to have been killed in northwestern Syria. The north of that area is in the hands of Turkish-backed Syrian rebels, the south is under the control of the battle group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). The latter group is the successor to the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, but has conducted many operations against underground IS cells in recent years.
Yet northwestern Syria remains a haven for jihadists. Dutch travelers to Syria also found refuge here after they managed to escape from the al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria. The Dutch government had refused to repatriate them for years. Last autumn, the Netherlands still collected twelve women, but the men are left behind. As a result, the risk remains that they escape and disappear from the radar.
Turkey is struggling with the consequences. Thousands of foreign IS members have crossed the Turkish border from Syria in recent years, the Crisis Group has stated a recent report. Ankara stepped up the number of arrests against them, but has come up against the fact that many countries refuse to repatriate ‘their’ IS fighters.
‘followed for a long time’
At the same time, there is criticism from the West in particular that Ankara has given the jihadists in northwestern Syria free rein for too long. Although Turkish intelligence services and military are very active in the area, IS leaders have surfaced several times in recent years.
According to President Erdogan, Qurashi has been followed by the Turkish services for a “long time”. It is unclear why the operation took place just now. Haffar of the local council in Jindires emphasizes that it is customary for intelligence services to first follow IS fighters for a long time in order to collect as much information as possible about them. “Moreover, this time he was in a remote house. That is ideal for such an operation.”
In any case, the timing suited Erdogan well. The Turkish president announced Qurashi’s death in a television interview ahead of the May 14 Turkish elections. He used the news to praise the international prestige of the Turkish intelligence services. “Such a thing gets the willpower of ‘bay bay Kemal’ [oppositiekandidaat Kemal Kilicdaroglu] not done,” Erdogan concluded with a mocking smile.